Testing, Grading and Morale… In a Foreign Language

Rebecca Norling

The author is an elementary teacher of ELL students who has been teaching for three years

(All names in this story have been changed to protect identities)

How does a teacher go about assessing a student who speaks no English? How do I keep morale up while administering standardized tests, which are inequitable by nature, to someone who is just familiarizing themselves with our language and school system? And what about district writing prompts, spelling inventories and other required evaluations? These are some of the struggles I face when a newcomer, or beginning English speaker, emigrates from her home country and is unwittingly tossed into my classroom.

In my self-contained class of English language learners (ELLs), ten-year-old Jannie is the newest. She immigrated to the United States with her grandmother and three sisters in March of 2007. The girls are without their mother and father, who are deceased and missing, respectively, in the family’s native country of Congo. When they fled, they chose to move to Maine to be close to an aunt, uncle and cousins who have lived in the U.S. for several years and who could assist them in finding and paying for housing, receiving health care, and other such necessities.

Jannie and her sisters enrolled in my school in April of 2007. The fourth-grader had attended school in Congo for nearly three years, where she learned basic math and literacy skills in Kinyarwanda, one of the four languages she spoke in Africa. So believe it or not, she has an advantage over most newcomers entering my room, who typically have had no schooling, or very limited schooling, in their home countries and who need to learn skills as basic as holding a pencil and using a pair of scissors.

But despite her advantages, Jannie is currently the only newcomer in my group, and she knows it. She began the year a spunky, outgoing girl who loved to laugh and was excited to learn. But now, with just two months left in the school year, Jannie’s spirits have dropped exponentially. She is sad, she expresses that she doesn’t want to be at school, and she recently got in trouble for having her sister do her homework for her.

This is not the first time I’ve faced similar challenges with newcomers in my class, nor will it be the last. But Jannie’s case stands out to me largely because she began with such great confidence and a fiery demeanor. Jannie’s attitude about school and learning seems to be taking a route opposite what I generally see; most beginners start off discouraged and shy and grow bolder with time. What concerns me most is the hindrance that this negativity and decline in effort will undoubtedly have on Jannie’s progress, both socially and academically. In my experience with ELLs, personality and attitude have a huge impact on learning. Happier and more outspoken students charge ahead of their more reserved classmates.

Not surprisingly, the start of Jannie’s decline in “spunk” corresponded with the most recent administration of the ACCESS for ELLs test, which took place near the end of December. It was Jannie’s first experience with a large standardized test, and what it asks of students is far beyond what Jannie is currently capable of producing. The ACCESS measures English language proficiency in the four language domains: listening, speaking, reading and writing. It is administered to all ELL students in kindergarten through grade twelve in Maine and a handful of other states. Admittedly, I find the ACCESS to be the lesser evil when compared with the Maine Educational Assessment (MEA), and its results far more timely and useful. However, it is similar in the way it is administered, the way it looks, and certainly in the way it is capable of intimidating students. It certainly had this effect on Jannie.

Before I knew it, March rolled around and I found myself in round two of standardized testing as I administered the MEAs to a group of ELLs. My students received every accommodation that we were allowed to offer. The test was read aloud to them (with the exception of the reading passages in the reading portions of the test), they took as much additional time as they needed, and administrators were able to provide “sheltered English,” or to define unknown words, so long as they were not specific to the content being tested in a given section. So while these accommodations likely helped my more proficient students a great deal, what good is hearing the words read aloud when you don’t know what they mean orally, anyhow? What good is extra time when all you can do is randomly pick a bubble to fill in for each question? And for Jannie, true “sheltered English” would entail a definition for each and every word on the test.

For two weeks of mornings the MEAs dragged on. My students worked as hard as they could and were encouraged and rewarded throughout. But Jannie’s head definitely hung lower during – and following – those weeks.

At the elementary level in my school district, we do not issue letter grades. So, particularly with a parent population made up of immigrants and refugees who cannot communicate in English, my only means for reporting progress to families is our single-page district progress report. Content areas are broken down into subcategories, and there is just enough space to assign a number – one through four – to each area. The numbers represent standards, one meaning “Area of Concern”, four meaning that expectations have been exceeded, and two and three hovering somewhere in between.

I find this reporting process to be incredibly limiting. I cannot, in good conscience, assign newcomers like Jannie fours, threes or even twos for much of the reading and writing sections. In the area of “Topic Development” under writing, for instance, Jannie most recently received a number one. This is not because her topic development skills are “areas of concern” for me, but rather because she has only begun to touch the surface of topic development in writing, and only through dictation to a teacher. I have requested the use of the primary-elementary-level progress reports, which are far more appropriate for my student population, but have been denied. My only other option is to simply leave this box blank, as I do many others which represent skills that don’t apply to my students. So, rarely does a number one on a report card in my class mean that I am concerned about a student’s progress. Rather, to me it means a beginning skill, and so on each report that I send home, I cross out the words “Area of Concern” and write “Beginning Skill” in longhand on the hardcopies.

But, while this little system works for me as an educator struggling to adequately report progress, it is only my own. Does Jannie’s family compare her “scores” with those of her sisters and cousins, who all attend district schools but whose teachers may score differently than I do? Do they look at her report next to her younger sister’s kindergarten-level progress report, and simply compare the numbers (because they cannot read that the numbers represent very different learning on the report for grades three through five)? I have seen this happen in other families I’ve worked with who have students at different grade levels within my school. What if Jannie feels just as helpless at home as she does at school in this capacity? Just another blow to her ego, I suppose.

In review, strike one against Jannie is the simple fact that she is the only beginning English speaker in my room. She is surrounded by kids who have either been here a few years or were born here, and who have a much firmer grasp on the use of English and on social behavior in U.S. culture. Strike two is the helplessness associated with English-heavy documents, like the MEA, which Jannie understands that she is meant to interpret and which she cannot. Strike three is the issue of grading in our schools, and how even standards-based reporting can be read as “grades” and misinterpreted by families with limited English proficiency.

At our conference in March, I spoke with Jannie’s uncle (and guardian) about the problems I’ve noticed. I discovered that Jannie believes she has not made any progress in her learning of English. She feels that she is the only student in our class who does not speak fluent English, despite my attempts to dissuade this belief earlier in the year. She has told him that learning English has simply become too hard.

In answer to her misconceptions, I have begun explicitly sharing evidence of Jannie’s progress with her. She has become actively involved in self-assessment. For instance, I asked the class to read through theirs writers’ notebooks (essentially journals), which we began in September. Using highlighters, they were to notice and mark things they had gotten better at during this school year. For Jannie, there was little actual reading involved in this. But when we finished with a discussion about what students had noticed, Jannie was still able to recognize and explain the major differences, even if only in things like handwriting, using spaces between words and writing harder words.

Jannie responds well to me when the two of us are on our own. She enjoys reading to me and practicing sight words at my desk, sitting side-by-side. In this way, running reading records have been helpful for me in gauging Jannie’s progress in literacy, as they are conducted in a one-on-one fashion. Also through observation alone, I have been able to determine growth in her reading level. At the start of this school year, Jannie was classified as a “non-reader”. Now, she is reading at a Rigby PM Benchmark level three with teacher assistance. These running records help me in selecting more appropriate books for both independent and guided reading, and to anticipate which text features Jannie might struggle with, as well as which she might be close to mastering.

Our one-on-one time is also my opportunity to provide meaningful feedback to Jannie. Since she cannot read comments that I typically write in response to students’ written work or math worksheets, for instance, my feedback for Jannie has to be oral. I am trying to develop a cause-and-effect type of feedback for my students, in which I rely less on my own feelings (e.g. “I’m so proud of you!”) and more on what she has accomplished and what the results of her progress are (e.g., “I noticed that you got right to work on your spelling practice today and worked until you were finished. Now you don’t have to take it home as homework!”) Although the benefits are coming a bit slower for Jannie, all of my students seem to be responding to this type of feedback.

Jannie has also made gains in her ability to work independently. She is less reliant on teacher approval than she was in the fall and winter, and I have responded and adapted instruction by providing materials, opportunities, and even requirements for independent work that is attainable for Jannie. In this way, a regular classroom routine is essential for her, as it is for many of my students. Now able to read our schedule, which I write on the board daily, Jannie knows what she needs to do when an activity is completed and how to transition from one task to the next. This is a far cry from the student who, back in September, came to me every ten minutes or so for approval at each step of a task, refused to create her own drawings and would not write unless each word was spelled for her.

So again, how does a teacher go about formally assessing a student who speaks no English without completely crushing her spirit? While Jannie has made impressive progress in the context of my classroom and given her background, she has not done so for the purposes of grading, local standards or measurement of standardized assessment(s). The process of assigning unclear standards and subjecting non-English-speakers to rigorous and extremely biased testing in an unfamiliar language is demoralizing to these students as well as to my practice; will I ever have a student who can be adequately assessed in our system? Jannie’s intelligence is threatened and she has no means of demonstrating her knowledge. Her multiple languages and other skills and talents are not valued by our system, although they are by me. Really, who wouldn’t give up?

Now, with the end of the school year in sight, one of my major focuses will be on boosting Jannie’s spirits and attitude about school. I have begun this process, largely by setting aside one-on-one time to spend with Jannie each day. As it stands now, I feel like Jannie is on the up-swing. Her smile is appearing more often and she is less reluctant to participate in discussions. We are getting back to where we started this school year. I have to remind myself not to dwell on the months that set Jannie back in her learning, but rather to focus on the time we have left and how I can improve each day for her.

Provided that her family doesn’t move, which is a possibility, I will teach Jannie as a fifth grader next year. She and I are developing a strong bond and understanding of one another’s expectations, and a second year together would benefit us both. I sincerely hope I have the opportunity to send Jannie off to middle school a better-adjusted, happier child with an adequate handle on English and other academic and social skills.

Clearly, the problem I am describing is bigger than Jannie. She is a little girl who, sadly, is representative of a backwards system in which schools are punished for having high populations of ELLs. I learned only last year that the scores of students who fall into MEA subgroups, such as African American/Black, Economically Disadvantaged, and Limited English Proficient (LEP), are figured into a school’s cumulative scores more than once. For instance, the score of an Asian student in my class who comes from a middle-class family would be counted twice, once in the regular count and again for his LEP status. So consider a student like Jannie who is black, economically disadvantaged, and LEP; as I understand it, her score will be counted four times. How does this make any sense? My school, which currently stands at about 23 percent LEP, is compared with all-white schools in rural Maine, for example, and with those in the wealthy suburbs. It is, as they say, like apples and oranges. And as a result, schools like mine are on the naughty list – we stand to lose funding if our students’ scores do not begin to demonstrate “adequate yearly progress.”

I can teach test-taking skills until I’m blue in the face. But what good will that do a student who’s English is so limited that she cannot understand what is being asked of her beyond “pick a bubble?” I am told by administrators to take comfort in knowing that the MEA reading and writing scores of LEP students are not counted unless they have been enrolled in U.S. schools for one year or more. However, their math, science and technology scores will be counted, and as a third year administrator of the test (not to mention a product of the Maine educational system myself), I know how incredibly language-heavy these sections are. Also, my training in ELL education has taught me that conversational English takes four to seven years to master, while academic English takes six to ten. Yet one year is what we give our students.

I read a great article, “A Catch-22 for Language Learners”, in the November, 2006 issue of the Educational Leadership journal, in which Wayne Wright writes about a conference he attended on the effects of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). According to Wright, Sandy Kress, a former education advisor to George W. Bush and one of NCLB’s “chief architects… gave a powerful and passionate defense of NCLB, describing how, for the first time in history, the federal government was serious about educating all students, how it was finally doing something about closing the achievement gap and improving education for poor and minority students.” But when Kress was asked about English language learners, “he chuckled and then admitted that no one really knew what to do with them. All he knew, he said, was that they needed to be included somehow in testing and accountability programs.” So here I am, a lone classroom teacher, trying to find logic in this nonsense when those responsible for it haven’t the slightest idea why we’re doing with ELLs what we are required to do.
It seems like simple common sense to me that tests like the MEA should not be given to the student population which Jannie represents. And the concept of counting a student’s score multiple times is ludicrous. My administrators’ hands are virtually tied. As a teacher of and advocate for the ELLs in my school, I suppose all I can do is offer support, guidance and a smiling face to these students. Not to mention a continuation of the scathing letters to those responsible for this injustice, and fingers crossed that our next president will recognize these flaws and amend the unrealistic and crushing requirements.

Discussion Questions:

1. Think of a time when you have felt like an outsider, like Jannie. Perhaps you were visiting a foreign country, or maybe you moved to a new school as a child. What did people do – or what could they have done – to make you feel more comfortable? How could this memory translate into your classroom?

2. The standards movement has lead to report cards/progress reports based upon “standards” rather than grades. But often, as families learn that standards are simply a replacement for grades, they mentally translate them into “grades” and respond to their children and to teachers in the same ways they always have. Is standards-based reporting just a different way of saying the same thing? Are “grades” so engrained in the minds of our society that we cannot escape them?

3. Most educators teach test-taking skills to some extent. What if you worked with a student/students who you knew would not succeed on an upcoming test, no matter their preparations? Would you still go through the motions of teaching them how to take the test? Why or why not?

4. English language learners (ELL) represent the fastest-growing populations in many areas. Do you see any value in requiring that teachers/administrators be required to complete the necessary coursework to become endorsed/certified to teach this population? Why or why not?

[Print] [Close Window]